Simpli.fi is the epoymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Fort Worth, for programmatic media buying, display advertising, and streaming / OTT monetization. It is a data management and demand-side buying hybrid platform (DMP / DSP).
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The Trade Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
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The Trade Desk is the eponymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Ventura California, a demand-side / data management hybrid platform (DSP / DMP).
We compared The Trade Desk against a number of competing programmatic media buying platforms including Google's DV360, Centro's Basis platform, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and the Simpli.fi platform. In the end, we felt that The Trade Desk provides the most tools, options, …
If you don't care where your campaigns are running, if you don't care about your clients then feel free to do business with them. I would not recommend them to other agencies or business if they have a lot of particular advertisers and clients that they work with. It is too much work for them. If you want to do a self-service model with Simpli.fi, then I could recommend working with them. As long as I don't have to deal with their customer service daily, and my company has the control of the campaigns, I can feel more comfortable working with them. But even still, there are a lot of red flags that have been raised over the last few years and I am skeptical.
After extensive research of DSP and DMP platforms in the market, our agency made the wise decision to license TTD's platform and develop a long-term partnership. TTD continues to innovate and offer cutting-edge media buying solutions, access to more audience data segments, and access to new and emerging media channels like CTV/OTT and digital-out-of-home. We couldn't be happier with TTD's technology and is one of the most advanced agency users of TTD is a key differentiator for our agency.
Simpli.fi's Geo-Fencing capabilities are top notch! The ability to include an unlimited number of geo-fences within a campaign is invaluable, as is the ability to measure the effectiveness of a geo-fencing campaign in driving foot traffic to our clients' physical locations.
Our organization appreciates the knowledge, experience and responsiveness of Simpli.fi's customer support staff.
One of the things Simpli.fi does particularly well is the education of its users and re-sellers. From monthly webinars, to its Bullseye learning courses, they have a way to make the complex understandable to even the most green digital sellers!
Reporting platform leaves a lot to be desired. Requires a lot of trial/error to pull exactly what you need to drive optimizations/learnings.
The "stop"/"continue bidding" feature for sitelists, devices, player sizes, etc is awful. When you set something up specifically, you should not have the AUTOMATIC option to serve beyond those parameters.
Trafficking video (VAST/VPAID) tags requires a manual insertion of a click URL. Completely redundant ask and is not provided by advertisers as that URL lives within the ad tag. Should not require multiple actions traffic a video tag.
Creative approval process (manual) doesn't seem necessary and is not a part of peers' platforms. There is no "pause/deactivate" feature for creative, you remove them or adjust the end date.
It's very intuitive. We had some training materials, but found that users were able to navigate through the software without needing many resources. Our only suggestion would be to add hover-over capability in the browser, so users can see a pop-up message further explaining what each button does.
We noted no issues with our limited interaction with support. The software operated just as expected and we found that we were able to navigate needs on our own. We understand that The Trade Desk offers excellent support, so we believe it will be a good resource to us in the future.
We have done a lot of research on many other vendors that offer the same or even more as Simpli.fi and have found a great fit for our business. There are many other options out there for programmatic buying! My advice to you is do your research. Don't just jump into bed with one without knowing all of the facts. Ask questions. Do some digging. And NEVER take anything they say at face value. They are there to sell you the product and if you move forward, you will for sure be disappointed
The Trade Desk is a much better product than AppNexus. Even though both products showed promise awhile back, AppNexus stopped innovating and The Trade Desk became specialists on data, cross site tracking and CTV inventory thus having a better and more unique product that actually adds value to your advertising efforts.
The good thing about having an agency account is The Trade Desk lets you add your markups to the client billing.
We had a very positive response from clients regarding their perceived ROI on their ad spend through The Trade Desk.
We did not have many national clients, mostly local dealerships, so it was difficult for them to allocate a lot of funds to display advertising, even though the ROI yield was acceptable.
